This was another odd year for the convention, but that didn’t stop TV makers from bringing their A-game.
CES 2022 has been an odd year for the international technology convention — it’s in-person, but from the photos, few people are there. Similarly, TVs have been announced but you won’t find them anywhere on the show floor or in any of the keynotes. Still, neither of those issues have stopped the major manufacturers from going all-in on TV technology at CES 2022 — they just did it in an unconventional way by showing it ahead of time to select journalists. While we’ve yet to see every TV on this list in-person, we’ve taken briefings with each of the manufacturers and were able to ask questions about their specs, their features, their performance and, ultimately, what will give them the edge to become the best TVs of 2022. Below you’ll find our top picks from those interviews and our top prospects from the show. As far as we’re concerned, Sony unveiled one of the only truly next-generation TVs at CES in the form of the A95K QD-OLED TV. It’s the first QD-OLED unveiled by a major manufacturer, and according to the specs we saw, it will deliver everything we had wanted from the latest and greatest panel technology. QD-OLED, for those who are just hearing about it, combines the self-emissive organic light-emitting diodes that give OLED its perfect black levels with the color saturation of quantum dots. The result is a screen that has 200% of the color saturation of a traditional LED-LCD screen with higher peak brightness and wider viewing angles than an OLED. We’ll still need to test it in our own homes before we can shower it with accolades, but based on everything we know about the A95K, it’s the evolution of OLED we’ve been waiting for. There were no shortage of mini-LED screens announced at CES 2022 this year. Samsung and LG announced a bevy of them, as did Hisense and TCL. Yet, of them all, we’re most excited about the Z9K not simply because of its newfound mini-LED backlight or its 8K resolution, but because of the return of the incredible XR Backlight Master Drive technology. For folks who don’t remember, the Backlight Master Drive is what made the Sony Z9D Master Series TV one of the best TVs of the decade, and now it’s coming to a mini-LED model with an absolute boatload more contrast control zones to work with. The result, we expect, is going to be the best backlight control of any TV in 2022 coupled with the extreme brightness of an LED-LCD TV. Add to that Sony’s exceptional work in motion processing and natural color reproduction, and Samsung could have a real fight on its hands holding down the 8K TV market.
